


Lose the Name of Action

by kuumai



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura isn't nice in this one, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Keith (Voltron) Angst, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Post-Episode: s02e08 The Blade of Marmora
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:42:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24186079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuumai/pseuds/kuumai
Summary: Red is flying as fast as ever back to the castle, Keith assumes, considering how anxious she was to get going. He can’t be bothered to even sit in the pilot seat and feign being in control of her.The fight and the euphoria that accompanied it are gone, but adrenaline and anger and regret are left boiling within him.
Relationships: Keith & Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 97





	Lose the Name of Action

This. This is Keith’s happy place. 

He swings his sword widely and dismembers a robot. And another. And another.

“Your download’s complete, Keith!” Pidge’s voice says over the comms. 

He uses his full body weight to throw the sentry he’s currently engaged in fighting toward another, and the two crash into a wall, giving him an opening to sprint back toward the central console. He lets his bayard dematerialize so that his hands are free. The console is near the back of a large room with a tall ceiling, so the remaining sentries have a clear shot at him. Keith sees them aiming, though, and slides on his knees the remaining few feet toward the console to dodge the lasers, his red and white armor sparking as it scrapes along the ground. He grabs the hard drive that Pidge instructed him to use to download the ship’s intel, flips forward over the table to regain his footing without losing momentum, and flees the room. 

“Got it,” he tells Pidge. 

It sounds odd considering he’s in the throes of a battle on a Galra cruiser, but he hasn’t felt this happy in several days. Fighting the sentries isn’t as difficult as the trials he faced at the Blade of Marmora or as dangerous as infiltrating a weblum’s digestive tract. This is something he’s already accustomed to, unlike, for example, certain news he has recently received regarding his ancestry. 

Of course, it’s not ideal to engage in combat when on an intel mission. But the team anticipated this happening based on the security specs Pidge got, so they sent in both Keith and Pidge to opposite sides of the ship to download the info. 

Keith inhales as deeply as he is able, relishing in the euphoric adrenaline rush that fills him as he runs in the direction of the cruiser’s hangar, where the red lion awaits him. 

There are footsteps behind him suddenly; someone probably came out of a room adjoining the corridor. He speeds up.

“Wait!” wheezes a voice. “Please wait!” 

He maintains his speed at first, planning to ignore the voice, but his instincts say he should stop and see who it is, so he does. 

Keith turns, and sees that the bearer of the voice has his hands cuffed and is clearly not Galra. Or probably not Galra. Keith is living proof that one can’t exactly determine that by appearance.

When the prisoner catches up to Keith, he’s almost breathing too hard to speak properly. “Please. Please.”

Keith draws his knife with his free hand, and the prisoner flinches as Keith slices his handcuffs apart. “Come on. I’ll get you out of here.”

The prisoner nods, wide eyes betraying a hint of hopefulness. 

A smile crosses Keith’s face briefly, and then he spots sentries gaining on them from further down the hallway. “We need to move,” he says, and then turns, sheaths his knife, and continues running.

“Who are you talking to?” Lance asks through the comms. Keith doesn’t bother to answer; he’s focused on his escape.

They reach their destination quickly. Keith stops to press a hand to the screen by the large, arching doors. They slide open—thank goodness his handprint worked—and reveal the hangar.

The doors open onto a landing with stairs on the right and left, and in the middle is a railing to prevent anyone from falling several feet down to the main section of the hangar. The red lion is sitting in the aforementioned main section, and several sentries are shooting at her particle barrier without success. She’s being far more patient than usual, for which Keith is thankful, but he can sense her relief at his appearance. 

The stairs will take too long, Keith decides quickly. The robots coming up behind them will have a chance to catch up. With that in mind, Keith leaps over the railing, savors the free fall, and rolls on the ground to absorb the impact. Belatedly, he realizes that he should’ve helped the prisoner down. But as the thought occurs to him, the prisoner lands safely to Keith’s left. 

“Nice,” Keith says. The prisoner grins.

By now the sentries have turned their focus away from the lion, and Keith summons his bayard, making sure to keep a firm grasp on the hard drive.

“Green and I are heading out now,” says Pidge.

Keith falls easily into his rhythm, dodging lasers and slicing robots and trying to control his breathing. 

“Keith, Pidge is nearly back at the castle, and we won’t be able to cover you from out here for much longer,” Allura warns testily. “Hurry.”

That puts a damper on his mood, but he shakes it off. He won’t let Allura get him down right now. He was starting to get tired anyway. He relieves a sentry of its head and finds an opening to the red lion. She’s shifting now, getting anxious. 

Keith sprints several steps and is almost to the mouth of the lion before remembering his companion. Right as the thought occurs to him, he hears a yelp of pain behind him. He whirls around, and several yards away is the prisoner, held in a chokehold by a Galra guard who has a gun to his head. The prisoner cringes away from it unsuccessfully. It’s probably burning him. The free and ecstatic feeling of battle drains out of Keith almost instantly, replaced with a dread that boils in his stomach. 

“I said to hurry, Keith!” Allura scolds. “What’s holding you up?”

“One second,” Keith mutters. 

Red is getting more and more worried. 

“Hand over the info you stole and you can have this guy!” the guard cries over the commotion.

_ Think, Keith, think.  _ Surely Pidge would have rigged the hard drive to send the info straight to the castle, so maybe he could hand it over without ruining the mission. But if that was the case, why did he need to grab it in the first place? 

“Keith!” Shiro and Allura say simultaneously. This is the most Allura has addressed him directly since the trials, which is probably not a good thing. 

“Hand it over!” yells the guard, and the prisoner held captive in his arms looks at Keith, and his eyes are terrified, pleading—

Keith needs to make a decision. Quickly. Why can’t he think? That’s his forte: thinking on his feet, not freezing under pressure. But he can’t focus with all this  _ noise _ . 

Keith makes a halting motion as though to toss the hard drive, and hesitates. 

Then Red is scooping him up in her mouth, and through her closing jaws he catches a glimpse of the betrayed look in the prisoner’s eyes, and he feels it like a sharp pain in his stomach. 

Red is flying as fast as ever back to the castle, Keith assumes, considering how anxious she was to get going. He can’t be bothered to even sit in the pilot seat and feign being in control of her. 

The fight and the euphoria that accompanied it are gone, but adrenaline and anger and regret are left boiling within him. 

They land in the castle’s hangar, and Keith storms from the red lion almost immediately. He’s frustrated with Red for acting on her own, and Red is not apologetic. 

Pidge is waiting for him outside the doors of the hangar, and she follows him, jogging to keep up with his pace. “What held you up? Why are you walking so fast?”

“The princess will want to lecture me,” he responds, because there’s no reason not to tell the truth; they all know Allura’s patience with him has been lacking as of late. He’d rather just get it over with so he can crash in bed for approximately a decaphoeb. “Oh, here’s this.” He pauses in his march just long enough to drop the hard drive that he nearly forgot he had into Pidge’s hands. 

Shiro meets them about halfway to the bridge and falls into step at Keith’s other side. “Are you okay? You’re not injured, are you?” Shiro asks, and the unfiltered care and concern in his voice makes a good amount of Keith’s anger melt away, leaving behind a strange tightness in his throat. He swallows it away.

“No, I’m not injured,” Keith replies. 

“Okay,” says Shiro, in a tone that says he knows it’s not okay. 

They’re at the bridge by this time, and Keith doesn’t allow himself to hesitate before entering. 

Allura is standing in the center of the room, hands on her hips and chin up. Hunk is rigid in his chair, gnawing on a nail, and Lance sits up from a slumped position when he sees them enter. 

Keith comes to a stop a respectful distance from Allura. As he levels his gaze with the pink marks on her cheeks, the emotions Shiro managed to unveil within him seem to fade to numbness. 

“I’m going to be frank with you, Keith,” says Allura. “Your actions today were not acceptable.”

“Yes, Princess.” He notices distantly that he should feel embarrassed about being scolded in front of the entirety of the team. 

“You put the mission and the team in danger by dallying and taking an unnecessary amount of time to get to your lion. You didn’t respond to a decent portion of our attempts to communicate with you. I will not have the paladin of my father’s lion behaving in such a manner.”

Of course she would play the King Alfor card. As though Keith doesn’t feel unworthy of the lion enough as it is. Well, he’s plenty confident in his abilities as a pilot and as a fighter. But no matter how good he is, he would never match King Alfor. Especially not in Allura’s eyes. Especially not with his heritage. 

Usually he would feel angry at Allura for comparing them, or hurt. He doesn’t feel much of anything at the present. 

Apparently he took too long to respond, because Allura is speaking again, her volume rising. “Have you nothing to say for yourself?” Keith glances at some movement behind Allura—Coran turning around from where he was piloting the castle—and then looks back to her. 

“I’m sorry, Princess.” 

“Are you mocking me?” 

“No, Princess.”

Her eyes flash with anger. “I will not have you undermine my authority with halfhearted apologies and faux deference! I’m appalled that even you would have the nerve to say that you are sorry without a trace of remorse on your face.” 

She takes a step toward him, and he takes a reflexive step back, and quiznak, could he not at least pretend to have some dignity? He glances to the side and some discomfort seeps through his detached haze as he becomes aware that everyone else is silently watching this exchange occur. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, attempting to put genuine remorse into his voice and expression and not finding it difficult. He  _ is  _ sorry. But he wasn’t stalling the mission without reason, either. 

“If that is all you have to say in your defense, you may leave now,” Allura says, and the anger on her face is replaced with the cold indifference Keith has begun to grow accustomed to seeing directed at him. 

He inclines his head once and leaves. 

It takes a moment longer than it should for him to notice that Shiro is following him back down the hallway. 

Shiro knows when Keith does and doesn’t want to talk, so they walk in silence for a minute. Shiro worries too much for his own good, though, so he can’t stay quiet for long. He asks, “Do you need water? Food?” 

Keith shakes his head sluggishly. “I want to go back to my room and sleep.”

“Okay, that sounds like a good idea.” They take a few more steps, and then Shiro says something that sounds like “Are you sure you’re okay?” but Keith isn’t totally sure because everything is starting to look and sound like TV static. 

He tries to blink away the gray spots, but they won’t disappear, and he suddenly feels nauseous, so he leans on the wall next to him and slides down it until he’s sitting on the ground. 

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Shiro says, alarmed. It sounds like he’s crouching to Keith’s left. “You sure you aren’t injured? Did you hit your head?”

All the questions are making him dizzy. Putting his head between his knees and closing his eyes, Keith says, “No, I’m not hurt. For real.”

“Then why are you acting like you nearly passed out?”

“Because I nearly did. It’s shock or something, probably.” He gasps a breath, because his heart is racing and he feels lightheaded. “Quiznak.”

“Please tell me what happened, Keith.” Shiro’s voice is so earnest and concerned that the choked feeling in Keith’s throat returns. 

“I found a prisoner,” says Keith. “In all the chaos, he must’ve escaped wherever they were keeping him, or whatever. He asked me to help him and I brought him with me. He—I don’t remember anyone saying that this ship held prisoners.”

“It’s a cargo ship,” Shiro says, and his tone turns cynical. “But I suppose the Galra empire might consider prisoners cargo.”

Shiro was careful and deliberate with the wording, but Keith still felt it like a pain in his chest. How could so many of his species be so cruel?

“You—you’re right. You know, his hand-to-hand skill was incredible. Maybe he was a rebel. Um. We almost made it to Red, but some guard caught him and threatened to kill him if I didn’t hand over the hard drive, and I froze, and Red got me out of there before I could do anything. And now the guy is probably dead. So that’s why I was late. I’m sorry. I know I should follow orders and move quickly, but I couldn’t just leave him behind. But I guess I did anyway. In the end I just put everyone in danger for no reason.” His voice rings in his ears, and he isn’t sure how much of his speech is coherent, especially since his head is still between his knees.

Shiro places a comforting hand on Keith’s shoulder, and he finally looks up. The TV static is gone. With a sad smile, Shiro reaches across Keith to wrap him in a hug. He buries his face in Shiro’s shoulder. 

“It’s okay, Keith.”

“But it’s not!” Keith means it as an angry protest, but it comes out sounding defeated. “I ignored Allura’s orders, and I couldn’t even save the guy!”

“You… you can’t save everyone, bud,” Shiro says tentatively. “I’m sorry you’d ever be put in a position where you feel like you should.”

“But I know that. I know I can’t save everyone. That’s not—I should at least be able to save one!”

“You’ve done so much already. I’m so proud of you. Please be kinder to yourself, kid.”

At that, Keith’s eyes sting. “I tried to help him. I’m sorry I couldn’t. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to Allura.”

“Allura didn’t know that you were trying to help someone.”

Keith nods against Shiro’s shoulder. 

They sit there for a moment quietly, and then there’s another voice: Lance, probably on his way to his room. “Hey, woah, is he okay?” he asks, as if Keith can’t hear him. “Or, duh, no, he’s not, but is he hurt? What happened?”

“He’s not hurt,” Shiro says. Keith doesn’t bother to move from where he’s sitting; he’s embarrassed himself enough as it is.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Could you grab us a couple water packets and bring them to Keith’s room?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” Lance replies quickly.

Shiro pulls away from Keith then, and Keith looks up to see the earnest smile Shiro gives Lance. “You’re a good man,” Shiro tells him. 

Looking like he might blush, Lance nods and rushes away. 

All at once, Shiro’s attention returns to Keith. “Do you think you can make it to your room?”

Keith nods. Bracing one hand on the wall and one on Shiro’s arm, he rises to his feet. He no longer feels like he’s about to faint, but the lack of adrenaline has left him shaky, and he’s tired enough that he doesn’t feel ashamed to lean on Shiro. Together they complete the journey to Keith’s room.

Inside, Shiro helps him onto the bed, and Keith’s eyelids are fluttering almost before his head hits the pillow. 

“Rest,” Shiro instructs him.

He does.


End file.
